LDT proposal withdrawn..

The Eclipse LDT project which I talked about some time back has been unfortunately withdrawn. This is bad news.

Autoclipping??

Yahoo! now offers transcoded web pages for mobiles. If they do support any random site then they ought to be doing some sort of relevant content extraction on a page.. I think at some point of time we had discussed similar things in firstRain.

Hawa Hawa

And here I sit in the afternoon hearing for the first time in MP3, the faint notes of Hawa Hawa by the once famous Hasan Jahangir, playing on a colleagues machine and I say to myself I am lucky :) For me the album is a collector's item. Really I mean it. Even during college days when the pockets were always light I had spent 18 Rs IIRC on buying a copy from a certain friend Ajit Khanzode who had once bought it in his childhood craze I guess. However, over the last few years I have lost track of the cassette :( Hopefully I can lay my hands on the mp3 :)

Another good blog

Via one the earlier two recommendations..
The Jesustan Diaries. The Pervert's Progress is a pretty nice, in a perverse way :)

TOI hears dirt on TOI

Checkout this conversation about a TOI faux pas on Chien(ne)s Sans Frontières. Has some comments from TOI employees. This is the first evidence that I have come across which tells that all the -ve feedback has started reaching TOI.

Some recommedations

I recommend reading Imaginathon. This is Suhail's blog who used to be a colleague.( In a way still is but has moved to a far away land (of the free) for now :) )

Another recommendation is C***S***F Chien(ne)s Sans Frontières. Suhail co-blogs here and has also won a writing contest for the Myopia for the Masses piece on the same blog.

Eclipse LDT

I am looking forward to the Eclipse LDT (Language definition toolkit) project delivering something concrete. Eclipse JDT has a number of very good productivity features like refactoring support, completions, quick fixes, hierarchical view in the package explorer etc etc. However all these features are pretty tightly coupled with JDT and hence supporting same levels of functionality for other languages involves a lot of rework in terms of infrastructure. A typical example is a package explorer like view. If one adds support for a new language one needs to parse the source, create an AST and then populate the tree viewer widget in a package explorer like view with the appropriate values. Then one needs to listen on changes to the source files and update the views appropriately. Ideally one would like to create an AST (with a standard interface perhaps) and just hook it into the view and the rest should be taken care of. Things only get messier as your xyz language development toolkit plays catchup with other functionalities like refactoring, editing etc. There is a scope for creation of a platform layer over which addition of new languages is easier. The LDT project has this as one of its goals. Needless to say for IBM Rational tools the problem is similar (or worse even) where we try to build modeling, visualization of source in UML notation etc. In the absence of a base toolkits the process involves creation of a JDT like toolkit on top of which we can provide our value adds. In these layers too addition of new languages becomes difficult in the absence of a common framework. Hopefully LDT will provide something good. Chris Daly from IBM has done some work on this is actively participating in the LDT newsgrp discussions. I think IBM should have some more participation. I am trying to understand the work that he has done and probably will be able to use some of his ideas in my work and probably come up with some on my own too ;)